Origin m-3 Page 13

  “I guess it took a lot of un-mothballing,” Malenfant said.

  “You got that right.”

  And now, right at the heart of the rust-grey industrial-looking equipment of the Shuttle facility, he made out a slim spire, brilliant white, nestling against its gantry as if for protection.

  It looked something like the lower half of a Space Shuttle — two solid rocket boosters strapped to a fat, rust-brown external fuel tank — but there was no moth-shaped Shuttle orbiter clinging to the tank. Instead the tank was topped by a blunt-nosed payload cover almost as fat and wide as the tank itself. The stack vented vapour, and Malenfant could see ice glimmer on its unpainted flanks; evidently the engineers were running a fuelling test.

  Malenfant felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.

  It was he who had produced the first back-of-the-envelope sketch of a Big Dumb Booster like this, sketches to show how Shuttle technology could be warped and mutated to manufacture a heavy-lift launcher, a remote descendant of the Saturn V, for this one-shot project. With Nemoto’s backers in place he had led the way in fleshing out the design, based on ancient, never-funded studies from the 1970s and 1980s. He had overseen the computer-graphic simulations, the models. His fingerprints were all over the whole damn project.

  But it was not until now, this oddly mundane moment here on this hillside, in a cheap car with jabbering Paulis and taciturn Xenia, that he had actually set eyes on his BDB: his Big Dumb Booster, the spaceship whose destiny would shape the rest of this life, one way or the other.

  But it was Paulis who had got the thing built.

  Even after Malenfant had been given presidential approval, such strict limits had been placed on budget and schedule that the NASA brass had soon realized they would need input from the private sector. They had turned to Boeing, their long-term partners in running the Shuttle, but Paulis had been quick to thrust himself forward. Frank J. Paulis had made his fortune from scratch; unusually for his generation he had made most of it from heavy engineering, specifically aerospace. He had made promises of impressive funding and the use of his design, manufacture and test facilities around the country — in return for a senior management position on the BDB project.

  NASA had predictably rebuffed him. Paulis had handed over his money and facilities anyhow.

  But after a couple of months, when the first calamities had predictably hit the project and the schedule had begun to fall apart before it had properly started, NASA, under pressure from the White House, had turned to Paulis.

  Paulis’s first public act, in front of the cameras, had been to gather an immense heap of NASA documentation before the launch pad. “This ain’t Canaveral, and this is not the Shuttle programme,” he’d told his bemused workers. “We can’t afford to get tied up in a NASA paper trail. I invest the responsibility for quality in you, each and every one of you. I trust you to do your jobs. All I ask is that you do it right.” And he set the documentation heap alight with a flame-thrower.

  There were some, raised all their careers in NASA’s necessarily safety-obsessed bureaucracy, who couldn’t hack it; Paulis had had a twenty per cent drop-out. But the rest had cheered him to the Pacific clouds.

  After that, Paulis had proven himself something of a genius in raising public interest in the project. A goodly chunk of the booster when it lifted from its pad would be paid for by public subscriptions, raised every which way from Boy Scout lemonade stalls to major corporate sponsors; in fact when it finally took off the BDB’s hide would be plastered with sponsors” logos. But Malenfant couldn’t care less about that, as long as it did ultimately take off, with him aboard.

  Paulis, remarkably, was still talking, a good five minutes since Malenfant had last spoken.

  “…The stack is over three hundred feet tall. You have a boat-tail of four Space Shuttle main engines here, attached to the bottom of a modified Shuttle external tank, so the lower stage is powered by liquid oxygen and hydrogen. You’ll immediately see one benefit over the standard Shuttle design, which is in-line propulsion; we have a much more robust stack here. The upper stage is built on one Shuttle main engine. Our performance to low Earth orbit—”

  Malenfant touched his shoulder. “Frank. I do know what we’re building here.”

  “…Yes.” Nervously, Paulis dug out a handkerchief and wiped sweat from his neck. “I apologize.”

  “Don’t apologize.”

  “It’s just that I’m a little over-awed.”

  “Don’t be.” Malenfant was still studying the somewhat squat lines of the booster stack. “Although I feel a little awe myself. I’ve come a long way from the first rocket I ever built.”

  At age seventeen, Malenfant was already building and flying model airplanes. With some high-school friends he started out trying to make a liquid-fuelled rocket, like the BDB, but failed spectacularly, and so they switched to solid fuels. They bought some gunpowder and packed it inside a cardboard tube, hoping it would burn rather than explode. “We propped it against a rock, stuck on some fins, and used a soda straw packed with powder for a fuse. We spent longer painting the damn thing than constructing it. I lit the fuse at a crouch and then ran for cover. The rocket went up fifty feet, whistling. Then it exploded with a bang—”

  Paulis said, reverent, “And Emma was watching from her bedroom window, right? But she was just seven years old.”

  Malenfant was aware that the girl driver, Xenia, was watching him with a hooded, judgmental gaze.

  Weeks back, in the course of his campaign to build support, he’d told the story of the toy rocket to one of his PR flacks, and she had added a few homely touches — of course Emma hadn’t been watching; though she had been a neighbour at that time, at seven years old she had much more important things to do — and since then the damn anecdote had been copied around the planet.

  His life story, suitably edited by the flacks, had become as well known as the Nativity story. His feelings of satisfaction at seeing the booster stack evaporated.

  He really hadn’t expected this kind of attention. But just as Nemoto had predicted, and just as Vice-President Della’s political instincts had warned her, Malenfant and his brave, lunatic stunt had raised public spirits at a time when many people were suffering grievously. In the end it wouldn’t matter what he did — people seemed to understand that there was no conceivable way he was going to “solve” the problem of the Red Moon — but as long as he pursued his mission with courage and panache, he would be applauded; it was as if everybody was escaping the suffering Earth with him.

  But the catch was they all wanted a piece of him.

  Paulis was still talking. “That thing in the sky changed everything. It didn’t just deflect the tides. It deflected all our lives — mine included. When I woke up that first day, when I tuned my “screens to the news and saw what it was doing to us, I felt — helpless. Swapping one jerkwater Moon for another is probably a trivial event, in a Galaxy of a hundred billion suns. Who the hell knows what else goes on out there? But I’ve never felt so small. I knew at that moment that my whole life could be shaped by events I can’t control. Who knows what I might have become if not for that, knocking the world off of its axis? Who knows what I might have achieved?”

  “Life is contingent,” the driver, Xenia, said unexpectedly. Her accent was vaguely east European. She reached back and covered Paulis’s hand. “All we can do is try our best for each other.”

  “You’re wise,” Malenfant said.

  She sat gravely, not responding.

  “On our behalf, please go kick ass, sir,” Frank Paulis said.

  “I have less than twelve hours before I fly back out of here, Frank. Tell me who it is I have to meet.”

  The car pulled away from the viewpoint and headed towards the sprawling base. Malenfant took a last long breath of the crisp ocean air, bracing himself to be immersed in the company of people once more.

  Shadow:

  Shadow huddled under a tree, alone.

  C
law came stalking past, panting, carrying yellow fruit in his good hand. She cowered away from him, seeking to hide in the deep brown dark of the tree’s thick trunk. He hooted and slapped her. Then he stalked on, teeth bared.

  Flies clustered around her hand. The webbing between her thumb and forefinger had been split open. Her inner thighs were scratched and sore. Her belly and breasts were bruised, and a sharp pain lingered deep inside her.

  Claw had used her again.

  Her hands reached for food — a sucked-out fruit skin dropped by somebody high in the tree above her, a caterpillar she spotted on a leaf. But her mouth chewed without relish, and her stomach did not want the food. Agony shot upwards from her deepest belly to her throat. A thin, stinking bile spilled out of her mouth. She groaned and rolled over onto the ground, huddled over her wounded hand.

  The light leaked out of the sky.

  There was rustling and hooting as the people converged on the roosting site from wherever they had wandered during the day. The high-ranking women built their nests first, weaving branches together to make soft, springy beds, and settling down with their infants.

  Somebody thumped Shadow’s back, or kicked it. She didn’t see who it was. She didn’t care.

  She stared at the dust. She did not eat. She did not drink. She did not climb the trees to build a nest. She only nursed the scarlet pain in her belly.

  Just before the last sunlight faded, she heard screeching and crashing, far above her. Big Boss was making one last show of strength for the day, leaping from nest to nest, waking the women and throwing out the men.

  The noises faded, like the light.

  Something smelled bad.

  She held up her hand in the blue-tinged dark. Something moved in the wound between thumb and forefinger, white and purposeful. She tucked the hand away from her face, deep under her belly.

  She closed her eyes again.

  Daylight.

  She pushed at the ground. She sat up, and slumped back against the tree root.

  The people were all around her, jostling, arguing, playing, eating. They didn’t see her, here in her brown-green dark.

  There was shit smeared on her fur. It was drying, but it smelled odd.

  The man called Squat was trying to lead the people, to start the day. He was walking away from them, shaking a branch, stirring bright red dust that clung to his legs. He looked back at Big Boss, walked a little further, looked back again.

  Big Boss followed, growling, his hair bristling all over his back. One by one the others followed, the adults feeding as they walked, the children playing with manic energy, as always.

  Here was Little Boss. He squatted down on his haunches before Shadow. He was a big slab of hot, sweating muscle, bigger in height and weight than Big Boss himself. He picked up her damaged hand and turned it over. He poked at the edges of the wound, where pus oozed from broken flesh. He let go of the hand, so it fell into the dirt. He inspected her, wrinkling his nose.

  He got up and walked a few paces away.

  Then he turned. He ran back and, with all his momentum behind it, he kicked her, hard. She ducked her head out of the way, but the kick caught her shoulder and sent her sprawling.

  Others came by: women, men, children. She received more slaps and kicks, and was confronted by teeth-baring displays of disgust. Shadow just lay in the dirt, where Little Boss’s kick had thrown her.

  But the heatings by the men were not severe today. They saved their energy for each other. Many of them jabbered and punched each other, in noisy, inconclusive bouts. The elaborate politics of the men was taking some new turn.

  Then there were no more kicks or slaps. The people walked-away, the rustle of their passing receding. Shadow was left alone. She dissolved, becoming only a mesh of crimson pain.

  She knew herself only in relationship to other people: not through the place she lived, the skills she had. Ignored, it was as if she did not exist.

  Now somebody crouched down before her. She smelled familiar warmth. She turned her head with difficulty; her neck was stiff. It was Termite, her mother. Beyond her Tumble, the infant, was playing with a lizard she had found, chasing it this way and that, picking it up by the tail and throwing it.

  Termite, huge, strong, studied her daughter. Her face was twisted by uneasy disgust. But she probed at the scratches on Shadow’s legs, dipped her fingers into the blood that had dried around Shadow’s vagina, and tasted it. Then she inspected the ugly wound on Shadow’s hand. Fly maggots were wriggling there.

  Termite groomed carefully around the edge of the wound. She pulled out the maggots, squeezed out pus, and licked the edges of the wound. Then she gathered a handful of thick, dark green leaves. She chewed these up, spitting them out into a green mass that stank powerfully, and scraped it over the wound.

  It hurt sharply. Shadow squealed and pulled her hand back. But her mother was strong. Termite grabbed her hand and continued to tend the wound, despite Shadow’s struggles.

  Tumble kept her distance. She would approach her mother, stare at Shadow and wrinkle her small nose, and retreat; then she would forget whatever she had smelled, and approach once more. She hovered a few paces away, attraction and repulsion balanced.

  Later, Termite put her powerful arms under Shadow’s armpits, hauled her upright by main force, and dragged her into the shade of a fat, tall palm. She brought her food: figs, leaves and shoots. Shadow tried to pull her face away. Termite grabbed her jaw and pinched the joints until Shadow opened her mouth. She forced the food between Shadow’s lips, and pushed at her jaw until Shadow chewed and swallowed.

  Shadow threw up.

  Termite persisted.

  By the time the roosting calls began to sound once more through the forest, Shadow was keeping down much of what she swallowed.

  The people returned. The adults carried shaped cobbles, or bits of food. Some of the men had meat.

  But there was much unrest. Squat and Little Boss were jabbering and throwing slaps at each other. Squat grabbed at a bloody animal leg Little Boss was carrying, trying to snatch it off him. Little Boss punched him hard in the nose, sending Squat flying back, and Little Boss took a defiant, bloody mouthful of his meat.

  When the women started making their nests, Tumble climbed up her mother’s legs and clung onto her shoulders and head.

  Once again Termite tried to make Shadow stand, but Shadow fell back and sprawled in the dirt. So Termite leaned over and let Shadow fall across her shoulders. She stood straight with a grunt, and Shadow’s arms and legs dangled at her back and belly.

  With powerful gasps. Termite began to climb a palm, laden down by her infant and her nearly grown daughter.

  Shadow’s head dangled at Termite’s back. She saw Termite’s legs and rump, a dark slope before her, powerful muscles working. With every jolt. Shadow felt her innards clench, and bright red pain flowed through her. Tumble’s small hands delivered stinging slaps to her unprotected backside.

  High in a palm, Termite let Shadow slide into the crook of a branch. Sweating and panting. Termite quickly pulled branches together to make a nest. Then she grabbed Shadow by the armpits and pulled her into the nest.

  Termite settled herself, curling around her daughter’s back. Whimpering, Tumble settled down in the nest at her mother’s back, on the far side from Shadow.

  The light slid away. The world was black and grey.

  Shadow closed her eyes. She slept, entering a deep dreamless sleep, with her mother’s warmth around her.

  When she woke, in the first pink light of day, she found her thumb in her mouth, as if she was an infant. Memories flooded into her head. Her illness was like a tunnel of blood red, leading back to greener days beyond.

  Her back was cold. Termite wasn’t there.

  She sat up. Termite and Tumble were in the nest, on its far side. Termite was assiduously grooming her infant’s fur. Tumble was picking through a lump of faeces, seeking undigested food.

  Shadow inspected the wound in her
hand. Green, chewed-up fibre clung to it. She licked away the green stuff. There was no sign of maggots or pus, and much of the damaged area was scabbed over, although the scabs cracked when she flexed her thumb.

  She hooted and scrambled towards her mother.

  Termite sat on the edge of the nest, her long arms wrapped around Tumble, watching Shadow with a hard, still face.

  Shadow sat for long heartbeats in the centre of the nest. She picked up bits of fur from the nest and teased them through her fingers. The scent of her mother was still there, mixed with the green smells of the tree. But there was a sourness too.

  The sourness was her own smell, Shadow’s smell. Her mother, like her sister, could not bear to be with her, because of the smell. She ripped at her fur, screeching, and scattered handfuls of it around the disintegrating nest.

  Termite watched impassively.

  A stab of pain, lancing up from the depths of her gut, stopped Shadow dead.

  She looked down at herself, her breasts and belly and legs. She felt a shiver of surprise that she was here, inside this body that stank so strangely.

  The pain stabbed again, hot and white. She doubled over, and. vomit surged from her, sour and yellow.

  It was a hard time for them all. With Big Boss weakening, the social order of the group was breaking down, and anger washed among the people like froth on a turbulent stream.

  It went hard for Shadow. Pushed even from her mother’s protective circle, suddenly she was the lowest woman in the group. They all hated her, not just for her low place, but because of what she had become, this stinking, bleeding monster. She could not defend herself, from their beatings and the theft of her food.

  But still she clung to the group. Still she made her nest each night, high in the trees, away from the cats and other predators, as close to the others as she dared approach. Much as she feared their fists, she was drawn back, for there was nowhere else to go.

  And she was still ill. Her bleeding had stopped. She was afflicted by stomach cramps and pain deep in her back. Her breasts and belly started to swell. She was violently sick each morning. Her days were a blur of pain and loneliness. When she saw her shadow, of a hunched-over creature with hair ragged and filthy, she did not recognize herself.